I'll be brief this time, as my brain is quite tired tonight.
My reference to pillage of other nations was pretty much all about superior military clout, as in the way Catherine Fitts describes the dynamics of power and control.
It's behind that primary wall of 'advantage' that 'free market capitalism' has done it's thing and cultivated it's vast mass of believers. Hell, I'm even one myself, up to a point, but I see that it has been a fleeting milestone on the way to a corporate tyranny.
The trend towards bigger and bigger corporations was probably an inevitable concequence of allowing the bankers to run everything. Capitalist enterprise and banking were such good and convincing bed mates. Oh the irony of it. I can't, for the life of me, see any difference between the boardroom of a large multinational corporation and the old Soviet Politburo. One was superficially political collectivism and the other is superficially economic collectivism, but amount to the same thing.
Now I've wandered far away from the point of this thread. I'll stop here and shut up.